I'll Build You Wings
by Ness Frost
Summary: All of his life, he'd been making plans. He hadn't been planning for their lives to fall apart... but sometimes, the only choice left is to pick up the pieces and build anew. Rating for mentions of death.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ or any of its characters.

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When Teo had been born, he had anticipated the moment he would first see his son walk.

He had fantasized about so many things, back then: using his inventions to make their town prosper so that Teo would have a good place to grow up in, watching Teo set down roots here and start a family of his own—perhaps even having more children someday. They had had so many dreams, dreams they had talked over in whispers in the night after Teo had drifted off to sleep. His wife had wanted to try for a girl next.

"Teo is such a sweet-tempered child," she'd whispered. "I'm sure he would love to have a little sister."

"We'll see," was the only answer he'd given. In reality, however, he'd already been drawing up plans in his head for adding another room to the house, calculating how much more he would have to earn to comfortably feed another child. His wife liked to remind him that plans changed, that just because one intended something for one's future, there was no guarantee one was going to get it—but he'd always been a firm believer in order, in control, that if he planned ahead carefully enough and accounted for all possible contingencies, there was no logical reason for him not to obtain exactly what he'd set out for.

All of that had been before the flood.

His wife had died near-instantly. The last he'd seen of her had been a glimpse of her terrified face, her hand reaching out for his—he'd only been a hair's breadth from grasping it before the flood waters had swept her away. Later, slogging through the mud and the wreckage of their houses, calling out desperately even though his voice was all but lost amid the cries of all of the other frantic survivors, he'd finally managed to stumble upon her by mere chance: she was lying half-buried in the mud, her face so bloated and swollen with water she was nearly unrecognizable.

In the course of a single night, he'd lost everything—everything, that is, except Teo.

When the healers told him that his son would live, but would never walk, he wept. There was, however, little time for grief: it was up to the survivors to pick up the tattered remnants of their former lives, to find somewhere that they could start anew, and everyone now looked to him for answers.

"We need to find another village to take us in before winter," he'd answered. They had few supplies and less money. They did not have the resources to rebuild from the ground up.

The first town they came to turned them away. "I'm very sorry," the village head stated as he looked over the ragtag bunch of weary travelers, "but our resources are stretched thin as is, thanks to the war." At the sight of their worn and dejected faces, he sighed. "We can take in one or two," he amended at last. "But no more."

In the end, they'd left behind an old man who could not walk without his cane, and a pregnant woman whose husband had died in the flood. Everyone else shouldered their packs and continued walking.

It was the same at the next village, and the next, and the next after that. They left people behind here and there—the old and infirm, parents with small children, and, once, one of their midwives settled in a village whose only healer had recently died. The rest of them continued to move. Wherever they went, those who could work offered their services, and he sold invention after invention to pay for their food.

All the while he carried Teo on his back, and the child observed everything around him with wide-eyed wonder, pointing and babbling with glee. He was the single bright spot in this otherwise bleak and drudging existence.

Teo was the one who found their new home.

The air had turned from crisp to biting and the first wispy snowflakes were beginning to fall from the sky. They had just left yet another village that could not take them, and were beginning to despair that they would ever find a home—indeed, that they would not die of starvation in the middle of the wilderness. They had sat down to rest on the village outskirts, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, and almost no strength left to take them there anyway, and he had taken Teo into his arms, holding his son close as tears streamed down his face.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "But I can't give you a future."

He'd have to take Teo back to the village, he decided, and beg them to take him in. They had to have enough resources to feed and shelter a single child, and even if he was doomed to die homeless, he would have some measure of peace if he knew that his son might live—yet he put off the act for several long minutes, wanting to hold Teo in his arms one last time.

Finally, he could delay no longer, and stood. As he rose to his feet Teo started pointing and babbling once more.

"Not now, Teo," he started to say—stopped. There, along the line of Teo's pointing finger, was a distant structure built into a mountaintop.

The slope was steep, the air thin, but they made the climb with renewed energy, trailing down the mountainside in a long line. When they finally reached the top, gasping for breath, it was to find themselves inside of an old ruin—it didn't look as if anyone had lived here for decades, at least.

Nevertheless, they called as they spread out among the ruins. "Hello? Is anybody here?" The only answer they got was their own voices echoing back at them.

The beds they found were hard, what sheets remained threadbare and serving as nests for several unhappily dislodged families of rat sparrows—but for the first time in months, they were able to sleep soundly.

The first year they spent just trying to survive the winter. After that, however, he started to make improvements.

He carried Teo then, and at first, his son was content to doze in his arms or to look about from atop his back while he worked. As he got older, however, the boy started to fidget, and then to protest out loud.

"Dad, I want to play with them." Following Teo's pointing finger, he saw a group of boys who were running about the temple, playing what looked to be some version of tag.

"I'll take you over, then." He smiled. "Or I could call them over here, if you like."

"No, I want to _play_." Teo's bottom lip trembled as he looked once again at the other boys. "Why can't I play with them, Dad?"

That night, he sat in his workshop with his head in his hands. Now, he could carry his son, but what was going to happen when Teo got bigger and he got older? There would come a day when he no longer had the strength to take his son's weight for him.

He would have to find a way to help Teo help himself.

All throughout the next week, he did not come out of his workshop except to eat or sleep, and sometimes not even for that. When he emerged, it was with a wheeled chair that was just big enough for a young child.

This first design was crude—the wheels stuck every other turn, and the axles began to rattle if pushed too hard or too fast. When he first set Teo down in it, however, the boy gave a wide grin before shooting off to join the other children.

Every time he made a new chair, he improved it, and it wasn't long before Teo had mastered the art of getting around under his own power. Soon, he was playing games with the other children like any other boy, leaving his father to smile faintly as he watched them from a distance. This hadn't been a part of his plans—none of this had—but plans changed, and he knew now that he would still get to watch his son grow up.

One day, when he was exploring what appeared to be a storage room, he came across a most peculiar device.

It snapped open at his touch, revealing a structure oddly reminiscent of the skeleton of a wolf bat's wings. The cloth in between the supports had long since been eaten away—but to the experienced eye of an engineer, its original purpose was unmistakable.

That night, he sat in his workshop once again, sketching out the finer points of the glider design. On the other side of his desk sat the design for Teo's wheelchair.

"Dad? What are you doing?"

Quickly, he shoved the new designs under the blueprints for the crane he'd started building last month. Looking back, he saw Teo in the doorway, rubbing his eye with one hand even as he yawned.

"It's a surprise, Teo." Pushing his chair back, he got up and made his way over to his son. "I'll show you later, if I can get it to work."

"Promise?"

"Yes, I promise." He smiled. "Now go to bed. It's late."

"M'kay, Dad." Still yawning, he turned and wheeled himself out of the workshop. His father stood in the doorway and watched until Teo was well out of sight.

Teo might never walk—but he looked forward to the day he would first see his son fly.

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**A/N:** This is my entry for the family/friendship competition, which can be found here: topic/161633/127388786/1/#127468533. I decided to do something that took place prior to the Fire Nation's discovery of the Northern Air Temple, so I could keep more focus on the family aspect.


End file.
